Lenovo K6 Note Review - Underrated Midrange Jack Of All Trades?

The mid-ranged phone market is hot with competition. Phones that come between 10K and 15K are usually strive for balance of great performance, good cameras and beautiful screens. To set itself apart, Lenovo equipped the K6 Note with a 4,000 mAh battery in a slim metal and glass body. Is this enough though?

Lenovo K6 Note review

In our first impressions, we found that we like the metal with glass build quality with hot specs of 4 GB of RAM, 4000 mAh battery and the Snapdragon 430 with Adreno 505 GPU.

Display Quality

Carrying a 10 point 5.5 Inch FHD IPS w/ 2.5D curved glass at 401 ppi, the screen on this thing is amazing. Although we've been seeing some mid tier phones rocking QHD display.

Either way it is still super sharp with 401 pixels per inch with an good IPS panel that makes color rich in saturation and widened dynamic range. It gets fairly bright even outdoors but depending on how bright the sun is, it is sufficient for most day lighting conditions.

The touch screen is also quick and responsive and we've never had an imprecise input. We are happy with the display and the touch screen!

Audio Quality

Speaker below

The K6 Note's audio is good. The volume reaches acceptably loud levels that can keep up with crowded rooms to a certain extent. It won't be able to overpower noisy open areas though. However, at the highest volume, the trebles, the bass and the mids are preserved and there is no distortion. I am comfortable leaving it at max without loss of quality.

Music output through earphones sounds great with both stock and third party earphones. We used our RHA S500i with it and we found it above average. The Warmth is there while the bass and the rest of the spectrum are equally balanced with each other. Audio are well separated with decent sound stage.

The microphone is great for recordings and calls for the price. We've never had a concern where the caller from the other line found our voice uninviting.

Battery Life

Great battery score!

The 4,000 mAh battery performance of the K6 Note is solid! We were reaching 30% battery levels at the end of a 8 am to 5 pm work day where we spent most of it texting, calling, GPS navigation, LTE, e-mail, chrome browsing, YouTube streaming and instant messaging!

Solid battery performance!

What is more surprising is we tried having the LTE on for the whole working day and it still had a little less than 15% left after our typical 8 hour work day! Benchmarks are even higher than most of the competition clocking in at a whopping 11 hours and 59 minutes!

It even has an Super Power Mode that will lower processing performance and lower the brightness of the screen to maximize power consumption.

Charging time would take up 90 to 120 minutes depending on how much battery is left.\

Camera

At the back is a 16 MP f/2.2 w/ PDAF and dual tone LED flash

Lenovo kept the user interface as simple as possible. It has fast-motion, slow-motion panorama, Night Nightscape modes and Artistic HDR. The fast-motion records at an increased frame rate and speeds up the action recorded while slow motion slows down the fast moving action. The Artistic HDR is basically HDR mode but with specialized settings for different subjects like cityscapes, landscapes etc.

It also offers an PRO mode where you can set your ISO, Exposure compensation, White Balance, Shutter speed and Focus. The ISO can get up to 1600 from 100, and the shutter speed can last up to 2/3 seconds but only works for the main camera.

Autofocus is fast but hesitates sometimes. The main camera also detects faces quite quickly.

Quality-wise, the K6 Note takes good photos with good color saturation and high resolution. We did find a noticeable amount of noise / grain in indoor and low light images taken. At extremely low-light the noise reduction softens the images that the resolution is visibly lessens. Otherwise, it is very good.

Rear Camera Samples

Daylight sample

Daylight close-up

Indoor close-up

Night shot

Flash test

For selfies, it has an 8 MP f/2.2 front camera with dual tone screen flash (chrome and pink). There is a beauty mode from level 0 to level 7 and it does smoothen facial imperfections.

We can also trigger the shutter via a 3 second timer or doing gestures like the peace symbol which can be very handy.

The images out of the selfie camera are good but also suffers from the noticeable noise / grain that was in the main camera. We found that the added tones didn't really add too much to improve image quality even when used at proper lighting conditions.

Selfie Camera Samples

Selfie test 1

Selfie test 2

Selfie test 3

For videos, the K6 Note is barebones with a small crop factor. There is almost no other option on the video mode other than the button to record and switch between cameras. There is no option to select frame-rates or resolution which is kind of a bummer.

Videos produced by the camera are okay. Acceptable resolution of 1080p, 720p and 480, but it doesn't say what frame rate the videos are in. Colors are saturated with sharp HD footage but it gets grainy when shooting low light which is inherent even in stills.

The Slow Motion and Fast Motion modes are extra video modes the slow motion records at lower resolution to shoot at higher frame rates which give noticeably soft video. It performs just like the iPhone in the sense that you can select specific parts of the video to be in slow motion. The slow motion effect itself is good otherwise the resolution lost is too big for us.

The Fast motion on the other hand produces great resolution and decent framerate videos that speed up the action recorded. The results are very good compared to the slow motion.

Video Samples

Performance

Benchmark scores!

The K6 Note is no slouch! The benchmark scores at 1080p which reaches 45K on Antutu! This coupled with the Adreno 505 in paper makes it potentially a gaming powerhouse for the sub 12K price point!

Great Benchmarks!

This resulted in smooth performance for most tasks. Multitasking with its 4 GB of RAM is unparalleled. We can comfortably browse with 5 chrome tabs with out problem! It loads several apps with multiple background processes with ease. Inside is 32 GB of storage that can be expanded by up to 256 GB.

We've never experienced hiccups or hardware caused force closes. The phone is a delight to use.

Lenovo's UI

Under the hood is the Lenovo's own skin of Near stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Performance wise it is lightweight and snappy. With added Lenovo features like Quick Snap where when you double press any of the volume button while the screen is off to launch the camera app. You can knock on the display when the screen is off to light up the screen. One other useful feature is allowing to snap a picture using the fingerprint sensor.

Connectivity is great. We've never had problems in terms of Telephony, Bluetooth, LTE, WiFi, and WLAN. We've also never gotten complaints from callers on the other end with regards to call quality via Telco.

Verdict

The Lenovo K6 Note is built well with sturdy materials that all work together and are balanced across all categories with the battery performance being one of the best from a mid range phones today. Though the video capabilities are barebones and images are noticeably grainy this phone is one of the Jack of All trades, master of none phone that you can not go wrong with!

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